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Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Nintendo is suing the makers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claims 'There is no lawful way to use Yuzu'::Nintendo of America is suing the maker of the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu, saying it "unlawfully circumvents the technological measures" that prevent Switch games from being played on othe

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

DeCSS's creator was sued in California, under the state's trade secret law for disclosing the CSS key. Nintendo is suing under the DMCA for Yuzu violating the anti-circumvention provisions laid out in 17 U.S.C. §1201.

I follow emulator stuff pretty closely, and I'm not aware of any judgments for or against emulator devs going it from this angle. I hope I'm wrong, but this could set a very bad precedent if Nintendo is successful.

If you don't trust my word, the ArsTechnica article does a great job explaining why this is such a huge deal. In particular, this one quote at the end:

"Nintendo isn't attacking the core concept of emulation's legality. They are attacking the tools and techniques that you need to make emulation actually work. There's a whole chain of things you need to make emulation work and Nintendo doesn't need to destroy every link in the chain."

Nintendo isn't retreading old ground about emulators with this lawsuit as much as they're trying to kill or at least severely complicate the ability for emulators to actually emulate ROMs.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

From the article:

Nintendo goes directly after this [personal archive copy] argument in its lawsuit, arguing that buying a Switch game only means you "have Nintendo's authorization to play that single copy on an unmodified Nintendo Switch console." Any other copy is by definition an "unauthorized copy," Nintendo says, even if it's made by the original purchaser for their own personal use.

What's more, Nintendo argues that using Yuzu as a way to play legitimate Switch purchases on another platform (e.g. an Android device or Windows machine) is also forbidden. "Nintendo has the right to decide whether or when to enter the market of games for platforms other than its own console," the company writes.

This part of the argument specifically needs to be smacked and shut down by the courts. (Edit: I'm not saying what the law/DMCA says about it, but I'm saying if the court has discretion they need to shelve this argument from Nintendo.) If I purchase a digital copy of a song from Sony, I don't want to only be able to listen to it on a Sony Walkman, and only where and when Sony wants.

Hopefully they can find someone with one arm that buys switch games and plays them on PC with a special controller to bolster their case.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Agreed. That is an extremely far reach, and it would have really bad consequences for consumers if not smacked down.